It was supposed to be a nice, calm Friday afternoon.
Everyone was looking at the clock and counting the hours to the weekend, discussing what they were going to do over the next two days.
Then, a new email. From one of your biggest clients.
WHAT IS GOING ON? WHAT HAVE YOU JUST PUBLISHED? I haven’t approved that post. WHO PUBLISHED IT. DELETE IT NOW, IT’S TERRIBLE, IT’S WRONG!!!!1111oneoneone
And that nice, calm Friday afternoon was over. A gap in the workflow caused an unpleasant situation, misunderstandings, stress, anger, and who knows – maybe even the loss of a client.
It could have been prevented with a social media approval process in place. Today, we’re going to show you why you need one, how to set it up properly, and what you can do to get your nice, calm Friday afternoons back.
A social media approval process consists of approval guidelines that a company uses to ensure social media content is published. This review of the content, context, and subject matter for any given post is made to ensure that it complies with company guidelines.
Social media pages are often managed by multiple people, and even a single post can go through several rounds of approval before it goes live.
Establishing social media approval guidelines will help everyone involved in the process be more organized while reducing the chance of a serious crisis occurring.
We are all humans and make mistakes, especially if we have multiple social media accounts to manage, posts to publish, and social media platforms to monitor.
The problem is that even the smallest mistake can cost you, your brand, and/or your clients a lot of money. They might include:
Although a social media approval process does not eliminate all possible mistakes, it can reduce the chance of a fatal error being made.
Creating a social media approval process can be a lengthy and troublesome task, but once done it’ll make a huge difference in your company’s effectiveness. Figuring out all of the steps will make organizing and adjusting your work easier.
You can also use this for onboarding new employees.
If your company has a solid social media approval process in place, new employees will be able to learn the drill without the extra involvement of your existing team members.
If you’re an agency, a social media approval process will also prove useful when it comes to scaling your business and acquiring new clients. Because you already have the process in place, you can make a better impression on potential clients who may be impressed by how well organized and well-thought-out your team is.
Due to the fact that not many agencies have got the social media approval process right, you can even use it as a competitive advantage.
Putting business reasons aside, one of the main benefits of a social media approval process is that you, your team, your supervisors, and your clients can be on the same page. Having approved content means that all parties know what’s going on, can provide feedback, and are able to discuss it regularly so no one is surprised by the outcome (and doesn’t receive emails like the one in the intro).
All of the above points boil down to one thing: saving time. Social media teams have a lot on their plates, their supervisors are constantly busy, and clients are always on the move. A good social media approval process is like a well-oiled machine that saves time for everyone: clients won’t waste time communicating, teams can focus on other tasks, and everything will just work out in the end.
Creating a social media approval workflow may seem like an extremely difficult task, especially if you have never done it before. The following sections provide you with a checklist that makes a good starting point for your new social media approval process.
You have probably already done this in some form. To figure out the most effective social media approval workflow, you should list the directories that you need approval for with relevant information about each of them.
This list should consist of:
You can also add your own custom information. Although some of it may seem obvious to you, it’s worth adding it for the benefit of anyone joining your team later on.Â
The creation of such a list goes along with what should be done in step 2.
This step is a natural extension of the first one. Social media profiles won’t manage themselves – you need a team behind them. And while you cannot please everyone, you can build a perfect social media approval workflow by knowing your colleagues’ or employees’ abilities, skills, and preferences.
What roles should you assign?
Each role should be tasked with its own set of duties common to that role, as well as some superior responsibilities. This includes, for example:
Social media managers will sometimes simultaneously be social media leaders, account managers, and moderators. More people are involved in larger agency teams, so these tasks can be more evenly distributed.
In a social media approval process, the term “asset” refers to multimedia content. Managing these assets means ensuring they are accessible by the right people, at the right time, and can be found in the right place.
Organizations often had to approve each asset manually before it was uploaded to social media in the past, which was time-consuming and labor-intensive.
In the interests of the entire process, social media approval should be sped up.
Assets such as:
should be stored in one, accessible place (e.g. a platform in the cloud, available from any place in the World). This is useful not only for approval (and replacing a post rapidly, etc.), but also for better workflow, collaboration, and onboarding.
Having identified who is involved in the social media approval process, what their tasks are, and what needs to be accomplished, it is now time to make it work and connect the dots.
This step will look different for each of your clients or brands. You can enter some personal notes here that are difficult to fit into any range or bracket.
Examples:
This step is simply about checking if your elaborate social media workflow actually works. A social media approval process is like a shoe – it can be comfortable and take you places, but it can easily be too tight and cause blisters.
Get ready for necessary adjustments to your social media approval workflow, especially if you’re just starting out with it. Very rarely will it be spot on from the very beginning but rather some modifications will be required to better accommodate clients’ needs or make things easier for your team.
What, for example, could go wrong or be improved?
Like with everything, sometimes even a small change (e.g. eliminating one approval round or shortening the time for content approval) can be really beneficial for the whole social media approval process.
Your social media approval process should be SEA: Straightforward, Expandable, and Adjustable. If you’re looking for inspiration, let’s provide some via an example.
Client XYZ: a chain of three cafes in Boston. Derek is a Marketing Manager there who gives approval to social media plans. He’s a Client (C).
Agency XY: a medium-sized social media agency. The people involved in the Client XYZ project on which they work are Hannah (social media manager + moderator, SMM+M), Tina (social media leader, SML), Olaf (graphic designer – support, S).
The social media approval process for Client XYZ and Agency XY:
There are only 4 people in this whole example social media approval process, yet it takes 16 steps anyway. Just imagine how messy it could get if there were more people and steps in the pipeline…
It doesn’t have to be a disaster, though. Not when you have a great social media workflow in place, and not when you have Kontentino at your disposal.
Kontentino can be a remedy for nonexistent or faulty social media approval processes.
Kontentino was born in a social media agency to meet the needs and struggles of social media agencies, not only with scheduling, but also with content approval and collaboration.
Here’s how you can take control over your social media workflow with Kontentino.
#1 Approval process made in heaven
One of the main native features in Kontentino is a content approval option.
You can send single posts or whole content plans to your clients with just a few clicks in order to get their approval, which they can give on desktops or mobiles. This saves a lot of time and helps you get the green light faster than ever before.
This also works for internal approval.
#2 Comments, tasks, and labels for better navigation
Even the best social media approval workflow can get messy if just one small element stops working, which is why you should always aim to simplify the navigation. With Kontentino’s features such as comments, tasks, and labels, you would have to try really hard to get lost.
#3 Live post preview
Many clients or supervisors may reject content if they can’t visualize how it will look once published. Agencies or teams are often too busy to create mockups, and if they are made then editing them can be difficult or even impossible if any additional corrections are required.
With Kontentino, you can see exactly how posts will look when they go live. If there are any changes required, they can be made and saved in real-time.
#4 Post requirement checklists
You’ve done it again – sent a content plan for approval with typos, missing important elements, or simply lacking hashtags? Now you need to send the right version, and your apologies. But with Kontentino, you don’t have to.
Thanks to post requirement checklists, you can set up a list of all the required elements to cross off every time you plan a post. This way, you won’t forget about any of the important elements in your content plan again. And even if somehow you still do occasionally, no worries – you can fix your mistakes straight away instead of sending hundreds of attachments (and “sorry”s).
#5 Quick communication
You can leave internal and external comments directly in Kontentino, access the conversation history, and check previous edits to narrow down each change or area for improvement.
The example of a Client XYZ & Agency workflow can happen in a single Kontentino dashboard instead of multiple emails, attachments, and documents. From A to Z.
Maybe one of these social media management tools will steal your marketing team’s heart. Read our list of the best Hootsuite alternatives.
Can you manage multiple social media profiles without a social media approval process? Sure, but that would be like running a marathon in flip flops. While you may be able to do it, not only is the run itself uncomfortable but it may also cause a lot of problems afterwards.
You surely don’t want that feeling, so how about you start creating your own social media approval process as soon as possible instead?
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